Debian Weekly News - December 21st, 2004

Welcome to this year's 50th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community. The Oxford University's computer centre will complete its move to PostgreSQL running on Debian as the back-end database
over the next year. The next stable
update is being prepared and expected before New Year's eve. For those of you who
celebrate Christmas we wish you a Merry Christmas.

Sarge Release Progress Update. Andreas Barth sent in an update on the release progress for Debian 3.1. He reported that GNOME 2.8
has been added to sarge and that a kernel update is inadvertently binary
incompatible with its predecessor. The KDE maintainers have presented a plan
for getting KDE 3.3 into testing that meets the release team's
requirements.

Debian GNU/Hurd supports large Partitions.
The latest upload
of the hurd
package features a patch by
Ognyan Kulev which has support for ext2 partitions larger than 2 GB on
32 bit systems. A Kerneltrap story has more details on the
history and implementation of the patch.
Over the last years, this limit
had become an increasingly annoying issue of the GNU/Hurd system, so
this change represents an important milestone for Debian's GNU/Hurd port with respect
to user expectations.

Packaging the Katie Suite. Andreas Barth reported that
he has installed DAK (the
Debian Archive Kit) on volatile.debian.net. The installation of packages
prepared by Jörg Jaspert went quite painless. It has integrated proper
NEW handling and some staging area for the review before inclusion.

Debian on AMD64.
Ladislav Bodnar reviewed
the unofficial port of Debian to the AMD64 architecture, noting
that almost all the Free Software he uses is already in the
archive, with the notable exception of OpenOffice.org. He
discussed use of an i386 chroot to run legacy 32 bit software and
described the installer as "rather dull (in a positive sense of
the word)".

Standard CDD Tool? Sergio Talens-Oliag finished a proposal for a tool to be
used by the custom Debian distribution (CDD) developers. It tries to
standardise the way developers define their CDD and provide tools to
distribute, install, update and manage the customised system. Comments should
be sent to the debian-custom list.

Unattended Debian Installations. Carla Schroder posted
the second
part of her tutorial on installing Debian using Fully Automatic
Installation (FAI). The first
part covered the basic configuration for a Debian FAI server, whilst the
second part explained configuration of the client installations - network
server settings, what software is going to be installed and the client boot
methods. She concluded that although initial configuration of FAI can get
complicated, it is perfect for mixed networks that contain different kinds of
PCs and once it's set up client installations are lightning-fast.

Debian Project at FOSDEM? Wouter Verhelst called
for help for the Debian presence at next year's FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Developers
European Meeting). The developers room is well on its way with five confirmed
talks already, but for the booth, more people are required.

Status of the Debian AMD64 Port. Due to an older mail
accidentally processed again, Martin Michlmayr stated
that all technical concerns were addressed and that the port would go in after
the mirror issues will be sorted out, which will happen some point after the
release of sarge.

Packaging OSSP Packages for Debian. Raphael Bossek proposed
a common naming scheme for software packages derived from OSSP software. Since Debian already contains
packages and files with the same name conflicts are preassigned. Basically he
proposed using a common prefix which is what Piotr Roszatycki has already implemented.

Reporting Bugs in Debian or Upstream? Ian Wienand wondered
where he should file a bug in a GNOME package since the GNOME project
maintains a bug tracking system as well. Paul Hampson replied
and proposed to file the bug upstream and then open a Debian bug report with
that reference. Thomas Bushnell, however, pointed
out that the regular way would be to file a bug in Debian and let the
package maintainer forward the bug to the software authors.

Orphaned Packages. 1 package was orphaned this week and
requires a new maintainer. This makes a total of 226 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software
community. Please see the WNPP pages for
the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA:
if you plan to take over a package.

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